


My Strange Uncles from Abroad

by gellavonhamster



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 23:38:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20479373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gellavonhamster/pseuds/gellavonhamster
Summary: Beatrice Jr. contacts her other uncles.





	My Strange Uncles from Abroad

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Группа Пропащих Волонтёров](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16039004) by [gellavonhamster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gellavonhamster/pseuds/gellavonhamster). 

_My strange nephews from abroad_   
_I'll meet them on the cosmos streets_   
_And we will drink to how we never told you_   
_To trust a plastic beat_

_Bright open eyes, they are still looking_   
_They are still finding_   
_A few unpoisoned hearts_   
_No matter where you are exiled_   
_– Gogol Bordello, My Strange Uncles from Abroad_

“Mr. Epilogue! Mr. Epilogue, there’s a letter for you!”

“A letter?” Frank asked absentmindedly, his eyes still on the list of guests. He needed to cross out that family from Zagreb: they had just called and cancelled their reservation. 

“For you and your brother, Sir.”

“I’ve picked up the mail from the mailbox literally an hour ago. Did they really deliver anything else?”

“No, Sir,” the maid shook her head. “It was lying on the windowsill in the third-floor hall.”

Frank frowned. His experience showed that the letters appearing from nowhere on the windowsills and cornices and balconies rarely contained good news. 

“Give me the letter.”

“I was thinking,” the maid began to gabble, “that maybe you dropped the envelope when you were picking up the mail and some guest picked it up, only it’s strange they’d put it on the wind…” 

“Miss Blumenfeld,” Frank interrupted her, “would you kindly give me the letter?”

The girl pursed her lips, handed him the envelope, and walked away, swinging a feather duster fretfully. 

The envelope was pretty crumpled. There was no stamp, no return address – nothing but his and Ernest’s current surname and place of employment, something that barely anyone should have known. Perhaps in vain they had hoped that it would be enough just to flee abroad, change their names, and destroy the old passports; they should have taken it a step further and faked their death like Dewey once did. Perhaps if they hadn’t been in such a hurry to disappear, they would have considered that. 

Ernest should have been on the third floor, presumably; Frank, of course, was not his brother’s keeper. He ought to find him so that they would open the envelope together: after all, the letter was addressed to both of them. On the other hand, there was no telling what was in that envelope. What if it contained something poisonous? As fantastic as such guess would have seemed to a third party, it was more than realistic. Indeed, he definitely should start by reading the letter by himself to be on the safe side – solely to protect his brother from potential danger. 

Frank tore the envelope open.

_Dear Sirs, _

_I am fully aware that by sending you this letter, I am breaking the promise I gave you at our last meeting when I contacted you for the purpose of gathering information for my latest book and my search for the people I was not indifferent to. Back then I promised not to bother you anymore and not to look for you, and I am sorry for not being as good as my word. Still, I would like to ask you not to tear this letter up as soon as you realize who had written it, and to read it till the end. As you are going to learn, I have a reasonable excuse to disturb you. I also hasten to assure you that your current address shall remain secret and is presently known, apart from me, only to one person, which brings us to the reason why I am writing this letter. _

_Dear Sirs, you have a niece. To be precise, we have a niece, since she is the daughter of my late sister and your late brother. For a long time, I was not completely sure of her existence, and I only met her four months ago. She contacted me to ask me for assistance in her search for the family that raised her and that she was separated from for a variety of reasons. Yet in the process of looking for that family, which we are presently engaged in, she also developed a wish to learn more about her biological family or, rather, whatever is left of it. I am writing to you at her request in the hope that you would satisfy her curiosity and her sincere wish to get to know you, and agree for a meeting. _

_Her name is Beatrice. Like her namesake back in the day, she takes interest in training bats, which have been used to deliver the present message to you. Another one of her hobbies is photography, and her progress in it would have certainly pleased her fourth uncle if she had the possibility to meet him. She is a very intelligent and well-mannered young lady of ten years and a half. I am almost certain that you shall love her – naturally, if you give her a chance to meet you. _

_If you agree for a meeting, please make it known by sending a letter or a fax to my legal representative whose contact information is provided below. If you do not agree, please still inform us about your decision so that our niece would not keep waiting for your answer in vain. _

_I hope this letter finds both of you in good health. _

_With all due respect, _

_Lemony Snicket_

Only having read the letter till the end Frank realized that he had been clutching it so tightly that the edges of paper got torn here and there. 

There was no one in the hall except for a couple of guests chatting enthusiastically on a couch in front of him. Nobody noticed the concierge leaving his workplace and disappearing in the staff room. 

“Shit,” Frank muttered after closing the door behind him, and leaned against the wall wearily.

It might have been easier if the envelope actually contained something poisonous.

They had a niece. But what if it was a trap, a bait, an attempt of VFD to bring back valuable assets? What if the letter was not from Lemony Snicket at all – or what if it was from him, but there was still no niece whatsoever? The last time they met, Snicket was an outcast, officially recognized as an enemy of VFD for disclosing so many of its secrets to the general public – but what if the organization took him back for one reason or another, and tasked him with atoning for his guilt by bringing home a couple more wayward sons? However, that would hardly be the case: at the time of their last meeting, Frank fell under the impression that Snicket would rather die than take part in the VFD affairs again. But how would an impostor know that Snicket met him and Ernest as part of his investigation? Frank hadn’t read any of Snicket’s books and wasn’t planning to, but Snicket had promised not to say a word about what happened to them after the fire at the Hotel Denouement, not even to specify whether they both survived. 

And then there was another possibility: they really had a niece. In all honesty, that possibility scared Frank the most. 

He had to show that letter to Ernest. To discuss what they should do next, and then send a message stating their decision by fax to a number provided in the letter and belonging to some D. H., as it was too risky to use the post and they had no trained bats or crows at their disposal. And all that had to be done as soon as possible.

Frank put the letter back into the envelope, folded it in four, put it into the pocket of his vest, and tried to forget about its existence. He almost threw the letter away, but something stopped him. 

***

A week later in the same hall, the maid (another one, not Miss Blumenfeld that time) called Frank to the phone: some gentleman wished to speak to him or his brother. 

“Hello,” Frank said warily, pressing the handset to his ear. “Basil Epilogue, how can I help you?”

“Listen, you don’t have to meet _me_,” Snicket began without preamble. “Ramona could meet you upon arrival, or I could simply give you the address and then you’ll get there by yourself.”

Frank felt anxiety cover him whole like a hunter’s net.

“A polite person starts a conversation with a greeting,” he replied surly. Thoughts went rushing in his head: what should he do? Where shall the thread of this talk lead him? Wouldn’t it be better to hang up, as pathetic as that may look – but then again, what would stop Snicket from calling him again?

“Good afternoon, Frank. Based on your reaction I conclude that you have received my letter and, just as befits grown-up mature people, decided simply to pretend that nothing had happened.”

For a split second, anxiety gave way to annoyance: damned Snicket. Damned snarky Kit’s little brother who always thinks himself the smartest in the room. Soon, both of them shall be on the wrong side of fifty, but that still remained his main impression of the youngest Snicket. Their entire family had always been nothing but trouble; it was only Jacques that… well, that didn’t matter. That had long since ceased to matter. 

Frank glanced over the hall, checking if anybody was eavesdropping.

“Yes, we received the letter. Are you happy?” It was easier to speak on behalf of both of them. That way he wasn’t the only guilty party. Frank hoped Ernest won’t find out about it. “Why would we believe at once that everything it said is true? Fine, let us say now I know that it was really you who sent it, but how can I be sure you’re not lying? Because I, personally, have no idea what’s on your mind and what objectives you are pursuing.”

“I could send you her photograph. Perhaps I should have done that from the very beginning. And enclose a letter written by her – maybe that would have persuaded you.”

Frank fell silent, not knowing what to say. Something immediately made him realize that to crumple the letter written by the girl herself and the photo of her, and to put them out of sight would have been much more difficult. 

“Please do not think me insolent when I say that I can see how you feel,” Snicket said unexpectedly. “When she tracked me down, I kept hesitating to meet her for a long time. I kept running from the past, and she was linked to it too closely in every respect, from her origin to her name. Besides, I was scared of having to assume responsibility for someone, for I am usually bad at this. I acted like an utmost coward, to be perfectly blunt.”

“What an ornate way to call _me_ a coward.”

“Oh, I never said that. Unless I could have… guessed, accidentally.”

Damned snarky Kit’s little brother. 

“Give me one good reason not to hang up on you right now,” Frank said coldly.

There was some sort of rustle on the other end of the line.

“Uncle, may I?” someone asked in a thin voice, quietly but insistently. “Let me try.” 

Frank froze.

“Mr. Denouement? Hello,” spoke the same voice, only louder and clearer. “Can you hear me?”

He could hang up, of course. But that would have been even more difficult than to crumple the photo of his own niece and never look at it again.

“Yes, I can,” Frank told her. He had a feeling his voice sounded chokingly, so he repeated, “I can hear you.” 

“Hello! My name is Beatrice, Uncle Lemony wrote you about me. I should have written you myself, probably, but back when I was writing to him, he didn’t believe at first that was really me, so we decided that you might be more likely to trust him. Are you all right?”

“Um… yes,” Frank felt out of his depth. He ignored this girl’s attempt to make acquaintance with him, and she wanted to know if he was all right. “Everything’s fine.” 

“Great! I’m not distracting you from your work, am I? I would love to talk to you, but I guess you must be busy over there.”

Frank glanced at a short queue that had formed by his desk. The queue was headed by a fat moustachioed man whose facial expression indicated that he must be mentally preparing to raise a stink and complain about service. 

“Write down the number,” he said, and quickly dictated the number of the phone installed in the rooms belonging to him and Ernest – a luxury available to few employees of that hotel. “Call me back in ten minutes. By then we’ll be able to talk without haste.” 

***

Needless to say, everything went awry. Surprisingly, the fat moustachioed man kept his composure, though his voice was most disapproving, but when it came to the old lady at the rear of the queue, she threw a fit while trying to convince Frank that the porter stole one of her hatboxes. In the end, the missing box was discovered by the hotel entrance; the porter must have saddled himself with too many bags and bundles at the same time and hadn’t noticed dropping one of them. By the time Frank had dealt with all that, ten minutes, and even fifteen minutes, had long passed. 

There was no knowing what the hotel guests thought on seeing the concierge, a man of quite considerable age, running headlong down the corridor. Admittedly, Frank didn’t care. A couple of phrases he had exchanged with Beatrice made it impossible to go on burying his head in the sand. He still wasn’t sure that he wanted this meeting to happen, that he was ready for all the emotions it would inevitable cause, but he could see that he would fall in his own esteem beyond measure if he at least doesn’t finish what has been started and doesn’t talk to her. 

He darted into the room and stopped dead at the doorstep – Ernest, seated at the edge of the table, was on the phone.

“All right, honey. Yes, we’ll try to manage it as soon as possible. Yes, I see. Be careful. And give my best regards to the Duchess of Winnipeg! See you then.”

Frank rushed to him but didn’t manage to stop him: Ernest had already put the phone down. Then he straightened his back and looked at his brother defiantly, as if flaunting what he had just done. Frank stopped. 

“That phone call was meant for me,” he said icily.

“That letter was meant for the both of us,” retorted Ernest in the same spirit. “Now can I finally read it? Better late than never, and so on and so forth?” 

“You told…”

“Calm down, she thinks I was put in the picture. And no, I didn’t introduce myself by your name. Now, the letter,” Ernest held out his hand pointedly, waiting for an envelope to be put into it.

Frank went to his bedroom, unlocked the drawer, took out the letter, and locked the drawer again. Having returned to the living room (if such a cramped and unadorned room could be called so, of course; even the best employees of the hotel had very mediocre personal premises), he passed the envelope to his brother. He put the letter in the pocket of his vest. 

“I thought you wanted to read it immediately,” Frank observed.

“Oh, I can imagine what it says, more or less. The conversation with our niece opened my eyes to everything,” his brother assured him, with a sort of grim merriment in his voice. “I’m going to read this letter just for the sake of it. Got the message despite my own brother doing his best to hide it from me – all done, moving forward.”

He fell silent at that and turned away. Frank crossed his arms on his chest. Seemed like the moment was approaching for him to apologize; he disliked such moments.

“I shouldn’t have acted like that,” he said finally. Ernest shrugged without turning to him.

“Well, this time it was you who did the dirty work, not me,” he said. “Must be healthy sometimes.”

“The dirty work?”

“Panicked, showed the white feather, messed up. The dirty work,” Ernest repeated. He turned to his brother, his arms also crossed, and Frank put his own arms down on instinct; the body itself seemed to resist being turned into the mirror image of his brother. The three of them used to be brothers from a fairytale – three brothers, three bears, three Norns, three Christmas ghosts. The two of them used to play certain roles for too long – the embodiment of the false dichotomy of good and evil, the noble volunteer and his wicked doppelgänger; the roles they wanted to have nothing in common with anymore yet still assumed from time to time automatically, by force of habit. That complicated their interaction, which has never gone smoothly to begin with. “One of us had to do that, so that the other could be indignant later. Thanks for letting me feel like a good guy for a change, brother.” 

“The harpoon gun,” Frank spoke in a low voice.

“What?”

“The harpoon gun. You weren’t the one to give it to that girl,” he clenched his fists so hard that his knuckles went white. “You weren’t the one to enable what happened.”

The vexation in his wicked doppelgänger’s eyes gave way to something else. To sorrow. To pity, dang it. 

“I think we’ve talked about this more than once,” Ernest said softly. “Sure, it wasn’t me who gave her that gun, but I also took part in all that, and couldn’t prevent anything. And our niece,” he waved his hand at Frank, gesturing to him to keep silent, before he managed to utter a single word, “knows it, since she has read Snicket’s scribbles. And she still wants to meet us.”

She knew what they had done – or, more exactly, what they hadn’t done. She knew, and she still found them. Still spoke to them politely on the phone, and still wanted to see them. 

They had a strange family, without a doubt.

It took quite a long time for Frank, who didn’t know what to say and simultaneously wanted to say too much, to pick the right words. 

“What do you suggest?” he simply asked in the end.

“To take a vacation. As soon as we can. To say that our aunt has died, or something.”

“We have no aunt.”

“We don’t, but Henry and Basil Epilogue most certainly do. For now. Guess the poor old lady won’t last long.”

Their eyes met, and Frank smiled slightly against his will; for the first time in a long period, not just because serving the guests required a smile.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ernest said. “I’m starting to suspect you want to hug me.”

“Don’t even hope. I was just thinking about the vacation,” Frank squared his shoulders. “I have an idea where to travel to.”

“What a coincidence,” Ernest grinned. His face lost all softness and sorrow, as if they were never there in the first place. The three of them used to be brothers from a fairytale – once. _The_ _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde _was no fairytale, but one could work with that too, if anything. “I also have an idea.”

They had a strange family, without a doubt.

He was curious to find out if their new relative had inherited that strangeness.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the epigraph are from a song of the same name by Gogol Bordello.  
I do not know if Frank and Ernest's names are supposed to be just a pun on "frank" and "earnest" or also a reference to _The Importance of Being Earnest_ by Oscar Wilde that uses the same pun with "earnest", but Frank and Ernest's new names are borrowed from Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. As to their surname, the epilogue follows after the denouement (I guess).


End file.
